Why is awareness of itself such a point when speaking about AI?
Neil Slater has it right, there most probably is no fear of AI self awareness as some starting point of evil series of things to happen.

Wikipedia [1] puts self awareness talks to sci-fi section, among stories, not a real thing. Self-awareness is among a list of terms that tries to make machines or aliens similarly human than ordinary people and uses that as a method of story telling.

Self-awareness or other humanlike skills that we posses that the machines don't have yet and will not have in near future can twist minds and make a seed of conspiracy theories, but at least the exhaustive Wikipedia overview on topic did not speak anything about AI.

Maybe the concept of humanlike behaviour materialises on our minds as a term of self-awareness but my source puts the origin to different category.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness